Soooo…
We have stew-full of Garys and Marys. We have a mouse who could smack the living Elder-essence away from them. Why doesn’t he do it?
My money’s on him being a liiiiittle less interested in murdering a town full of decent folk. Unlike some of our “heroes”…
So. What to do? Send away the one they could possibly use against you and surrender yourself with the person you know they want alive, hoping that you can talk yourself along the ride. Then you go and find who’s the one behind this all. The one you can actually blast to whatever Elder-dimension it ever crawled out of and thus save nearly everyone once again. 😀

It’s not going to be that easy – in terms of the plot. The farther along we go, the more certain I become of it. Simply “saving nearly everyone once again” in that way doesn’t pose for Oswald any logical conundrum. Yet that is what makes these stories work: solutions to logical conundrums.

The ultimate logical conundrum in Dreamland would be trying to save everyone there from one’s own dream. That’s what I foresee Oswald having to solve. If there’s a way he can do this without leaving Dreamland, I can’t foresee that yet.